Your distinction between wants and needs is an essential one. My paternal grandfather earned one dollar per twelve hour day digging ditches in Chicago--and he raised eleven children. They were reasonably happy on a low income. My maternal grandparents failed in rural North Dakota; they did not have enough to eat and had to put their children out as servants to others, just so the kids could eat. They were most emphatically unhappy.

We need relatively little to be happy--enough simple food, good water, warm clothing, shelter from the elements, medicines, education. The stoics claimed that happiness could only be found by reducing wants to genuine needs. Aristotle and Mortimer Adler had variations on this theme, which come down to the idea that we should want exactly what is good for us--and no more than that.

Nate: IMHO, there are male/female differences in regards to psychological fulfillment/contentment resulting from consumption or purchase of advertised products. A consumption based society is to a certain extent a "female" society (this was the point of the film FIGHT CLUB, with the main character obsessing about his Ikea furniture set in the opening scenes). Another example is the huge "mail order bride" business, which rests upon the desire of attractive young Eastern European, Russian, Asian and South American women to get to the consumption capital of the universe and spend, spend, spend (even if they have to hook up with an unattractive older American).

Here's a blog post that approaches the same question using a slightly different metric: Energy Use vs. Living Standards. Instead of reported happiness and satisfaction, the metric is the more technocratic (and objective) Human Development Index, which is a combination of life expectancy, literacy, education, and GDP-based standards of living.

Leanan pointed out that tropical nations will use less energy for heating than cold weather nations. Also, she observed that offshoring a nation's industrial base will reduce its apparent energy use, even as its citizens are responsible for increased energy use elsewhere.

My reply was this:

Those are all good points. The warmer nations will have lower space heating needs. On the other hand, there are quite a few cold-weather nations that rate in the top percentiles for energy efficiency with high living standards. Denmark, Ireland, UK, Switzerland and Germany are some examples. Similarly, there are a number of cold-weather nations that do well in terms of low per capita CO2 emissions with relatively high living standards. Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Lithuania, and Latvia are some examples.

You're probably also right that the less industrialized nations and the post-industrial nations will rate better on the low-CO2-with-high-quality-of-life measurement. (But remember how much energy is used and CO2 emitted by the building sector and by private vehicles -- significantly more than the industrial/shipping sector.)

At any rate, all proposed greenhouse gas reduction schemes are applied on a nation-by-nation basis. As far as I know, no nation has figured out a carbon tax or capping scheme that accounts for lifecycle energy costs across national borders. It would be a good idea, though, should it become politically possible. The advantages and disadvantages of a global carbon tax should be debated.

Though I agree that people can be happy while using less energy, I think that getting people give up certain energy intensive behaviors will be difficult and make them much less happy. Losses are taken harder than the pleasures of the status quo, and are feared more. That is what is making the transition so hard.

I think that the graphs are missing perhaps the most important point. It's not "standard of living" versus happiness that needs to be plotted, but CHANGE in "standard of living" versus CHANGE in happiness.

As a former stockbroker you must be aware that customers reactions to rising and falling portfolios is much different than the absolute starting level. How did your clients react to beating the market? To under-performing? I bet I know the answer because I've found that all clients react the same way.

People are acutely aware of changes in income and social status. It's all relative.

This essay reminds me of the "voluntary simplicity" movement, also "downshifters."

I wonder if anyone knows of data on how many people have tried to consume less and if there are time series data on their subjective happiness/well being?

Where are North Korea's numbers? I'm guessing if someone was allowed to poll them that they'd be below Moldova.

After watching the BBC doc "The Century of the Self"

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=the+century+of+the+self

it occures to me that our built-in happiness indicators have been hijacked by the PR/ Marketing folks. (along with our sexuality but those are intimately connected aren't they?)

Only through understanding this process can one hope to regain control.

Also a great presentation by Dan Gilbert called;

"The (misguided) pursuit of happiness"

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=happiness

Psychologist Dan Gilbert challenges the idea that we'll be miserable if we don't get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel real, enduring happiness, he says, even when things don't go as planned. He calls this kind of happiness "synthetic happiness," and he says it's "every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for."

We will have to do internal re-evaluations indeed.

Money keeps people and institutions in power. When most money is based on oil and energy (as it is now), it has value that lets you buy things like food and private corporate jets. When oil runs out like it is doing right now, that money loses value, and that money becomes worthless.

And before people will even evaluate their "wants and needs" voluntarily, gas shortages, stock crashes and loss of money value will force it upon them. After all, when money crashes, there will be a lot of angry, hungry people.

That’s why in an “ownership” society, it comes down to what “stuff” people claim rights to. If the ultra-rich have 13 homes all over the world, I say let them keep them. If you have a house and owe a $200,000 mortgage, hey, you just scored a great house and get to keep it!

If everyone gets to keep what they have at the moment, then the fear of losing “stuff” will allow us to work out this energy crash thing without killing off so many people. If bankers kick ebveryone out on to the streets - we have the complete Oh Shit factor.

But as far as happiness goes - yes, consuming less is certainly a path towards happiness - but when so many jobs are presently connected to consumption... we'll need to dirty up those white collars as middle managers become farmers.

After all, many people need a “mission” to give them purpose in life - and our collective mission would be to maintain the ability to feed, clothe, and transport ourselves. Let me assure you, there is LOTS of work to do to make that happen - it is a heroic mission that everyone can embark upon together. Consumerism is dead - long live self sufficiency!

But self sufficiency takes hard work. If the leaders of the world that are so fearful of us “little people” would realize that we are willing to still work, so long as we get time off to spend with family and such, then labor will continue.

I LOVE farming my little yard. I wish I could steal away from the chains at my desk to go work in the dirt. I would gladly hop on a bus with other laid off workers and ship out to a farm and help grow the food we need, since fertilizer and other oil-based inputs are going to run out and be too expensive for farmers to keep using.

I would like to think that the wealthy people of the world can still keep their “Stuff”, but that we would read stories about Paris Hilton working side by side with regular folk now and then. Or the CEO of Coca-Cola working two days a week on a farm… if they would just show some backbone the elite and the common folk could work it out.

But I’m just a dreamer. I highly doubt that families with blue blood and so many generations of wealthy living will go down without killing off us folks that don’t matter. We’re fungible fuel for corporate machinery.

That’s why I’ll just keep on farming my little plot of land and watch it all go down. Food grown at home tastes better anyway.

www.lawnstogardens.com

Neat, a complex subject. In "Figure 2" subjective well being it is notable that the majority if not all the unhappy countries are former East European countries or Soviet republics. A stark comparison can be made between Finland (very wealthy home of Nokia) and the Baltic states - Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - very unhappy former part of the SU. I bet if you ask them now they will be much happier, as was the Czech republic and Poland back then - free with a promise of EU membership waiting in the wings. I think you need to unscramble the plot for the political time table of leaving FSU, talks about joining EU, joining EU and ultimately joining the Euro.

The important point here is comaprative happiness. The Baltic states were probably very, very unhappy because they knew they could have been like the Fins - and once the promise of opportunity is granted, happiness will rise.

This is important I believe in the energy debate because we have a hierarchy of automobiles that are symbols of wealth, virility and social standing. The Chief Executive probably wants to drive a big Benz or a Porsche - because it is important for her to express her comparative importnace and success. I believe there is scope here for re-education whereby peers frown at such expressions of wealth and importance through materialism. The most important attribute of an automible is that it provides individual freedom to make a journey - and this freedon can be granted in a small, fuel efficient car.

Similarly, I personally am content to not travel nearly as much as I used to. By and large I've been their and done it and no longer have the urge to spend countless hours of misery at air ports, in taxis and on planes sipping G&Ts. But its quite important for me to know that I can still travel when I want to. If I was denied the option of foreign travel I'd go down a hack on the happiness scale - so I'd like that option in future even though I may not use it.

Finally, climate I believe plays a major roll in happiness - and cold northern countries tend to be less happy - and need to use more energy to survive.

Well done Nate, and I agree wholeheartedly. Even if we become very much poorer as a country, and no doubt we will, this doesn't necessarily mean that we have to turn into weapons wielding lunatics, and become completely miserable. I call this the "Whoville Factor" in honor of the Grinches.

Random comments.

Marketing, keeping up with the Joneses, that's a large part of it. We are being forced fed with crap.

Security. This is another part of it. The safety net is being shredded, and there wasn't that much of one anyway. So even if one doesn't want much crap, one is forced to accumulate.

Family. The extended family here has been decimated by job chasing. So that's one more support network down the tubes.

Community. Ditto. The corporation is the enemy of community.

Suburbia. Key institution in force feeding, isolation and alienation.

Personally. I'd gladly give it all up for a place to sleep, some food to eat, a future for my kids and grandkids, and a government that was friendly and peacable and I could think was mine. (There are people who think that way now, but they are extremely wealthy.)

Future? Hell in the short and medium term, here at least.But maybe some of what is happening south of here will catch on eventually: a gov't that says get yourself organized and we'll try to help you out. But there is quite a struggle ahead of us.

As other new members have noted, this site offers a wealth of information and insight and I, too, greatly appreciate the many contributions of this community. If only there were more hours in the day...

There are tremendous opportunities to use energy more wisely. Halifax's farmers' market, established in 1750 and the oldest operating farmers' market in North America, will be moving to its new facilities next summer. The building will be powered by on-site wind turbines and heated with active and passive solar energy. Located on Halifax's waterfront, it will be cooled with ocean breezes and by a harbour cooling system. In all, it will use 85 per cent less energy than its current location.

You can view the architectural renderings here:
http://halifaxfarmersmarket.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&i...

More information on this building can be found here:
http://halifaxfarmersmarket.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&i...

On a more personal note, I'm part owner of a family business and our main showroom was illuminated with standard 75-watt halogen PAR38s. The display lighting alone exceeded 9 kW. I replaced these halogen track heads with ceramic metal halide fixtures that produce the same amount of light, but use 1/6th as much energy -- 85 lumens per watt versus 14. Estimated savings, including reduced A/C demand: 40,000 kWh/year. Our security light (a 400-watt metal halide high bay) ran 24 hours a day and consumed some 4,000 kWhs/year. We didn't require that amount of light, so I replaced it with a smaller, two-tube T8 fluorescent fixture that draws just 58 watts. The energy savings from replacing this one fixture are enough to power my home's heat pump for an entire year.

It's not hard to find the hidden savings once you begin looking for them.

Best regards,
Paul

The main curves are GDP/capita versus happiness index. Is that adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity? (Just because you can live on $5/day somewhere does not mean you really can live on $5/day in, say, the USA or Germany where the basics are far more expensive; exchange rates tend to be more about luxuries than the basics.) If not, then the knee is too low on the GDP/capita axis, for the use being made of the curve here, making a visual reading misleading.

A more USA-centric question: the knee of the curve, at, say, $5000 or $6000 per capita, might just about cover current medical spending, and, even in places like Germany or France, very little beyond medical spending. Could we really be happy with almost nothing in life save for operations, drugs, and nursing?

Alternatively, could we really balance our economy as in the $6000-per-capita places, by cutting our medical spending by a factor of five or ten - in order to have anything at all in life besides operations, drugs, and nursing, such as food, clothing, shelter, and maybe even a little transportation? Wouldn't that cause a riotous social, political and religious explosion? Everyone here has the "right" to a liver transplant as needed, though that costs millions and often only extends life a few months. If the discussion does not confront this issue, then is it grounded in any sort of useful reality?

Nate,

Very nice article. Lot's of valid points mentioned above.

My take on it is that "happiness" is coupled with expectations. When you develop expectations and they are readily achieved, you tend to be content. When not achieved, you are not satisfied. The more unrealistic the general expectations, the greater the general dis-satisfaction. Most of the west, and especially the US of A have developed marketing and mass media to an art whereby expectations are constantly being pushed to new limits. Subtle placement of products, thrilling movies, more lavish settings on Must See TV, etc, keep driving the subliminal targets of our collective expectations.

I suspect soon we will have our collective expectations re-calibrated.

Happier... Yes. Is there an inverse correlation between happiness and energy consumption? To wit, the faster and farther I go, the less centered I be, and that does not make for a happier me.

I suspect different cultures react differently to pollsters. There may be a lot of Mexicans conditioned to give a cheerful response, and a lot of grumpy slavs.

I posted this yesterday to an older thread that's now buried so far back that no-one's looking at it. Someone asked essentially the same thing - surely we can be happy without "growth"?

My response:

Of course it would be possible. But would it be desirable? Mankind's greatest and most noble achievements are those in the arts and in science and technology (if I had to pick two, personally I'd pick Beethoven's 9th and landing on the moon). Neither of those would have been possible without the growth and progress of the preceding millenia.
The human mind is naturally inquisitive and creative. Those attributes, coupled with our ability to retain information and learning across generations, inevitably lead to a forward progression.
Would you really want to live in a stagnant world, with no new ideas, no new creations, no new technologies?
I'd much rather we were wiped out and replaced by another species.

Note that I'm using a rather abstract definition of "growth", which is essentially "accumulation of technological developments and artistic creations". This isn't a definition that per se requires continued significant growth in energy and resource usage, although personally, long term I do expect that we will use far more energy, if nothing else because we will need it to enable us to better re-use resources rather than dig up new ones. Also, if we wish to preserve the best of our of physical creations (paintings, sculpture, architecture etc.), some amount of incremental resource usage is necessary. But if this was the only driving factor, we would be using up the remaining resources so slowly as to be sustainable for many many millenia, after which I'd like to think we were no longer dependent on a single planet.

What a timely thread. I was viewing the user group site today for a technology I work with. The administrator of the site was so proud of the new stuff they got for their newer bigger house (which they needed so they could buy more stuff) that he decided to post it for everyone to see. What it has to do with the technology in question, I'll never know, but he sure seem excited about letting everyone in his profession see their new goodies.

I can't imagine how these folks are going to deal with the coming decline in energy and consumption of "stuff". Heck, you won't even need for TSTHTF for this lifestyle to become impossible... just a moderate economic downturn. I'd love to see their savings account and credit card statements.

So a few weeks ago, Kim and I moved into our new house. We love the new house in part because it has a lot more room than our previous home. One of the side effects of having a lot more room and a lot more rooms is that we just don't have enough furniture to fill the place. We decided that the "stuff" which previously furnished our living room wasn't quite up to snuff with our fancy new house, so all of that stuff was placed in the basement.

Furnishing a new house can be a very expensive proposition, so Kim and I have decided that we're going to do one room at a time, starting with the living room. We had it painted a warm taupe color before we moved in. The new sofa and chairs came from Italia Furniture where we felt we got a great deal for great quality leather furniture from Natuzzi. One of our neighbors has had this brand of furniture for 15 years and it's still in great shape. We've got the sofa and one of the chairs and we're waiting on the other chair to be delivered (we expect it in July)

[Photo here of a rather generic looking leather sofa that could only be considered Italian style because of the flag on the price tag]

When it came to finding a coffee table, the only one we could agree on was this $700 one from Pottery Barn, but the price was way too high so we kept looking until we found this one from World Market. They look almost identical and the one from World Market costs half as much with no sacrifice in quality.

[Photo of generic coffee table]

A big feature in our lives is watching TV, and we felt it was time to upgrade to a nice big TV which can be mounted on the wall above the fireplace. Kim let me do all the research and I came to the decision that Sharp made the best LCD TVs on the market and their newest model had all the features we wanted. We went to Brandsmart and negotiated the price down $100 from Amazon.com's price for the Sharp Aquos LC46D92U flat panel TV. This saved us nearly $900 off Best Buy's sale price (not even advertised on their site).

We've already purchased a rug so the last things to deal with in the room are the drapes and art on the walls. Getting this far has been a difficult process b/c Kim and I have very different tastes. We tend to jump on anything we can agree on. It's tough to classify exactly what we each like b/c I don't know the right words for it, but I tend to like traditional things and furniture which has sort of a East Indie/South Pacific feel to it, sort of like the Ernest Hemmingway collection from Ethan Allen. Kim's taste seems to run more towards either junk or crap, but I'm not sure if those are the accurate terms ;-)

As Nate well knows having spent time with Jay Hanson, humans certainly can be happy living with less energy. We've done so in the past. If we hadn't ever discovered fossil fuels there would still be a few hundred million of us living an agrarian lifestyle.

That's not the issue we are facing. The problems come when people have to ratchet down the lifestyles to which they've become accustomed. That's when the violence breaks out. Look at what happens when people used to living with electricity suddenly have to do without:

Pakistan: Mass madness breaks out in the suffocating blackness

And that's in Pakistan which is already many rungs down the energy ladder from the USA. Just imagine what will happen when the grid starts to fail in the US.

Of course some people on this list think we'll keep the grid running with windmills, waves, and solar panels. HaHaHa!

An interesting article from the Mises Institute, that I received via e-mail. Needless to say, they are not "Peak Oilers," but they are unintentionally describing a post-Peak Oil future.

Economic Lessons from the Amish

By Dan McLaughlin

Posted on 6/21/2007

The Amish are interesting people. Having lived much of my life in a rural area with a significant Amish population, I have had the opportunity to interact with them, and have some level of understanding of the culture. It is a fascinating study.

The Amish make a conscious choice to live without most of the modern conveniences that Americans take for granted. They have strong religious beliefs and a commitment to principles. Different communities have varying perspectives on what is allowable and what is not, but they all have a common belief that they must maintain a separation from the world and worldly things. They provide lessons to us that they may not intend, but are valuable nonetheless.

Their life is centered around the local Amish community, and they live separate lives from non-Amish people around them. They generally don't use insurance, but they share risk in a different way. They have a strong sense of internal community, and in time of disaster, they are drawn together to help their neighbors. When someone's barn burns down, there is a barn raising, where the whole community gathers to build a new one. It is an amazing display of cooperation.

Many people view full employment as the primary purpose of society. It is a concept that animates much of the discussion in economics and politics. If full employment truly is the primary goal of our society, then we should follow the lead of the Amish. They have developed a social structure that provides full employment for every member. In fact, the problem is not too little employment, but too much employment. They have to have large families with many helping hands to absorb all of the employment that the lack of modern equipment affords them.

Because they do not use tractors, they need many hands to plow, cultivate, and harvest the fields. Milking cows by hand is time-consuming manual labor. Shoveling manure by hand provides employment for some of the less fortunate members of the family. Cutting, transporting, and stacking wood for heat and cooking provides more work that can keep someone busy and sweaty for a considerable period of time.

By being fairly self reliant, rather than maximizing the benefits of national and international divisions of labor, they choose to be less efficient and to perform activities that subtract from the time they can devote to what they do best. By shunning modern labor-saving devices and technologies — such as electricity, hay bailers, power equipment, and modern milking facilities — they choose to live with less of everything. Many fall within the modern definition of poverty. Nearly all use child labor. They would starve without it.

Living with less is not necessarily a bad thing. I believe that most Amish people are very satisfied with their chosen lifestyle. Most do not regret the choices they made and find their lives quite rewarding. They are generally people of character who stand up for what they believe in, for the whole world to see.

Should full employment really be the primary goal of modern society? The Amish live in an agrarian economy. It thrives in the midst of modern society, not because of inherent advantages, but rather because it borrows much more from that society than meets the eye.

Most third-world countries are also agrarian societies, mired in a state of misery, reflecting the primitiveness of their economies. What they don't have, that the Amish in America do, is economic freedom, secure property rights, a well-developed system of trade, legal protections, fairly reliable money and access to the fruits of capitalist society. Yes, Amish do go to the store to purchase some things that make their lives simpler and more pleasant. They rely on cars and busses to transport them long distances. They use telephones when necessary. Trucks bring their milk to market.

Modern society is highly dependent on the division of labor, on vast networks of traders, on information and communications. The goal of modern society is not full employment, but rather the increasing prosperity that comes from continuing innovation and increasing specialization, trade and capital accumulation, where even the poor are better off than most people in the world. Economic freedom in fact reduces unemployment to levels significantly below those in less free countries. The Amish may hold the secret to full employment, but rejection of modern capitalism is full employment in poverty and hardship, not the rich fruits of progress.

Dan McLaughlin is a former corporate financial officer and is currently a columnist for The Post Journal.

Any spoiled brat who gets a toy taken from them will cry, kick and scream... but eventually calm down and cry themselves out. Only at that point will they listen to reason or adult advice.

We have a nation full of spoiled brats, unprepared for something so shocking (especially when they get wind it's not a temporary thing)- which means that:

1) Either they haven't been informed
2) They don't have provisions
3) Combo of the two

It's like when I'm drinking with my band mates. I tell them the store is closing, and to nurse their beer. They keep drinking their beer, it runs out, and then they get pissed it's run out and they can't get any more.

So then they want me to share my extra beer, which I have conserved. Now, I may be able to fight off my drunk bandmates, but a nation full of ignorance? .

So, what can be done? Honest preparation - and we need big media to do it. No pussyfooting - just the facts: The American Dream cannot be sustained, folks. Now here's what we can do about it... X, Y, & Z.

Without offering hope and a plan backed up by Maslow's heirarchy of needs, people will act desperately. Trying to remain calm while your only source of food is wiped out in a few days (grocery stores) - that's the issue Congress needs to address IMMEDIATELY.

What to do?

Federal subsidies for everyone to get the kits they need for growing food at home, and for people with no yard/land, quickly find a way to offer them some sort of peace of mind.

Welcome to the unraveling of the ownership society - we had better figure out how to appease those without or methinks they'll go get it with shotguns, pitchforks & torches.

www.lawnstogardens.com

as long as i can go to my local pub for a cold beer and play a few tunes on the jukebox i will be a happy man in a post peak oil world.

Great post, Nate scores again.

I really shouldn't sully this string with my own comments, but at least they'll be fairly far down the thread.

Clearly, ostentatious levels of 'stuff' or energy don't cause happiness once you have the basics. A few other comments:

The 'relative happiness' thing works not just in a 'keeping up with the joneses' sense; it seems to me that people (and even dogs) who have been mistreated and had to 'do without' basics in early life are generally happier in later life once their basic needs are met than are those whose basic needs were always met. There is a border collie lying across the room from me in a state of permanent transcendent ecstasy, his feet currently all 4 in the air and his nose stuck into the crack of the couch; he was mistreated as a pup, confined in a small cage on a 30th-floor condo balcony. When he came to us he was insanely afraid of heights, of pigeons, of being left alone, and of doing something wrong. He's now about the happiest animal I've ever seen, and I think it's because he has some sort of perspective on just how good he has it now. My Dad, as well, grew up during the Depression and was raised in a very austere situation and had to work; once he got the basics in life, he smiled more every day than I smile in a month. So would it maximize happiness to make sure that everyone started their life more miserable than they would wind up?

Changing subjects abruptly, I wonder about drug use. Back in the days before they declared war on marijuana-growing here in Hawaii, there was a not-innaccurate stereotype of poor local folks strumming ukeleles and smoking pakalolo, and smiling all the time. (these days, the drug of choice is crystal meth, which doesn't seem to have the same societal-euphoric effect). But hey, as Jay Hanson would remind us, happiness is about brain chemicals. If 'peak dopamine' were to be in our future, might drug use be involved? Would we burn less coal if we burned more reefer? Would we really need to go to the mall if we consumed the ethanol directly? And in terms of low-hanging happiness fruit, if getting sex was easier, arguably Americans wouldn't need to buy as much stuff. Perhaps "patriot brothels" could replace the nascar culture. Indeed, prostitution, if elevated to its proper status, could be a better basis for a pegged currency than precious metals. Not only would it be directly linked to brain chemistry, but there would be less reason to hoard - who could ever use up a million BJ credits? So Sex & Drugs should not be overlooked. Choice of music optional, but mp3 players don't take much energy.

Doing another abrupt segue, since the previous paragraph's panacea probably won't be realized, I'll note that one operative factor in the "boomerang" shape of the graph is the tyranny of "too many choices" which is faced by the increasingly affluent. There is a counter-intuitive malaise which comes from being forced to deal with the increasing complexity of decision-making as more "freedom" and "wealth" are taken on. Many americans are paralyzed by this, and are 'way past the point of diminishing returns in managing their personal decisions. If not cognizant of the trap, we wind up wasting most of our psychological energy and time in fight-or-flight situations which are artificial and matter not the slightest except abstractly to us. People in such a situation desperately want to be told what to do, whether they'd admit it or not. Simplicity is seductive, but people find it difficult to find a path to it on their own, so are often gulled by the simplicity of cultish ideas, argument from authority, or totalitarian 'revolutions', etc.

Of course, another odd sort of happiness is the satisfaction of figuring things out first and thus achieving perceived advantage. Not That There's Anything Wrong With It....

We photographed this truck at the Wild Rose ranch on the north shore of Henry's lake, ID on about June 15, 2007

while on essential non-gas-wasting about 3,900 mile two week vacation to Glacier Park and Yellowstone parks.

We saw only about 3 hummers and NO Toyota Priuses.

We listed to The Camel Club on the way up and The Road by Cormac McCarthy on the way back.

Monday, April 16, 2007
McCarthy Wins Pulitzer Prize

Cormac McCarthy's The Road has been awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Both are about as depressing as reading The Oil Drum or Peak Oil.

Cheers We're optimists.

Very good. In fact, your first chart doesn't really show any correlation between GNP and happiness, contrary to your initial commentary on it. There are just as many well happy nations (in the 70-80 percent happiness range) as unhappy nations, at low GNP. It is only when GNP increases significantly that we start to see marginal increases in happiness.

But you've hit the nail on the head. I would say that even the majority of posters here, who realise that peak is coming, can't contemplate making do with less and they strive to look for ways to replace oil, in order to keep the party going a little longer. I don't think there is much room for optimism in that. Until we accept that we can be happy with less, I don't think there will be any effort at adaption, rather than substitution, and so collapse becomes even more likely.

Hi to all. Very great post once again on oil
drum. Salute to all those dedicated writers and
researchers.

I got something to share I calculated last night
and found useful. Somebody here mention that
human happiness increase significantly
from 50 GJ/yr to 70 GJ/yr. I converted that into
how much human usable energy is available in a
pure agrarian society where all energy income is
from growing food. Then try to find how many
acres of farms we needed per capita to get say
70 GJ/yr.

A person on average needs 2350 k cal per day.
That translates into 3.6 BJ/yr just from food.
That is 1000 kwh/yr. To get that much energy
from food 2000 sq meters of farm land is needed
per person assuming we are farming the way it is done in
15th century using no chemicals, no machines and
only one crop per year in which all the water is
get directly from rain (no need of any dams,
canals, tube wells etc).

To give further break up of how much food we
need per person per day having a balanced diet
with flexibility of choice, region and culture
and how much food can be grown in 15th century
style I would request editors of oil drum to let
me have a key post. Though this site is about
oil but the underlying reason is energy and if
we all have to soon retreat to an agrarian
economy we must know atleast something about it
and the potential it provides.

For now I just want to share this information
that if available 20 acres of farms per person
we can get 72 GJ/yr/cap.

Amount of available farm land in world is about
12 billion acres (40% of total land area). If we
put aside half of it for wild life we can have
6 billion acres for our use. Using that we can
have food for 12 billion people in all but since
human population density is not uniform (high in
india, china, europe and very low in americas,
australia) we can think about a quarter of that
that is 3 billion people just having enough food
to live. So unless we have mass migrations from
highly populated area to low populated areas
(very hard in a post peak world) our calcuations
say our world can support 3 billion people at
most.

Remember we are talking about food only, that is
3.6 BJ/yr/cap. No match with american energy use
of 340 BJ/yr/cap.

Nate I like your idea if we can't increase supply. Can
we decrease demand? Furthermore for those of us that have been blessed with the knowledge that the shiny carrot is just a carrot. Means IMHO that we can look to other endeavours to fill the void.

W/r/to diminishing marginal utility. If we gave a man 5,000 blue mercedes benz's then following this reasoning then this man's amount of pleasure derived from the 5,001st should be virtually nothing. If we knew that this man possessed a shotgun would you be surprised if he would shoot someone trying to steal that 5,001st?

When we look at what we are consuming versus what we 'need' it is remarkable. It was estimated in the 1950's that the average family had some 300 wants. What would that be now? 5,000? Perhaps the terrorists to be most concerned with would moonlight in the marketing depts of the major corporations.

The epitaph of this society could best be summed up by the picture of the chimp with his hand holding an apple in a vase. He can't get his hand out as it is too big, and yet he can't enjoy the fruit. And the vase should have a picture of the person(s) who are responsable for functional obscolescence.

via con dios amigo

Just a note about that last chart. Singapore should probably be deleted from the results because it always looks bad. But from living in Singapore for a year (and experiencing life there) and also finding out about its economy, I think that the main reason that Singapore is ranked so high is because it has many oil refineries per capita. This oil then continues to its destination (and most is probably not used in Singapore). Singapore itself has an excellent bus and train system.

So am I a half-empty or a half-full kind of guy if when I see my beer glass has only 50% liquid in the bottom of it and the top 50% is filled with air that I drink it right down and order another beer. Well maybe the old half-empty half-full question is just pointless. And when I was on a life boat in the middle of the pacific during WW2 I didn't really give much thought to whether anyone was happy or not; we had too much to do just to survive. So how is our life boat (planet earth and western civilization) now? Or maybe you think you need to talk about your happines and your tender feelings. Sorry I don't have much time for that.

I recall seeing a graph of satisfaction (dependent) versus income (independent) in Your Money or Your Life, by Joe Dominguez & Vicki Robin. The book is of the how-to variety with the 'to' being financial independence (ie. no need to work for income). The book is ok, but my focus is the graph.

The curve on the graph was what I would call a reverse bath-tub. So, as income increased, satisfaction increased, then it plateaued, and actually decreased. This has some pretty stark implications. Of course, I can't recall whether the graph was based on actual data or was just to illustrate an assumed truth.

I'm not sure that there is a direct link to the energy-satisfaction graph, but it might be worth a look.